Calendar

I Am Not The Universal Mind

Last night, I was reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on history. It contains a lot of nonsense along the lines of the universe being found within a grain of sand, applied to human psychology. Emerson’s idea is that every human mind contains within it the potential of a universal mind. That’s an optimistic, and not very testable, idea, but it bothers me because it doesn’t represent the diversity of human minds, and the diversity of mental abilities within the human species, both preceding and as a result of individual development. I don’t believe in a thorough unity of human experience.

Later on, after Emerson stops talking about the universal mind for a while, he discusses the limitation of history as a source of knowledge and wisdom:

“Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, — must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.”

This seems, in Emerson’s way of exaggeration, too strong a statement, but there is a suggestion of something useful in it: The idea that the lessons of history are weaker than the lessons of firsthand experience.

I have witnessed old Sixties protesters try to lead younger generations in activism without much success, because the older protesters insist on pursuing an agenda that is shaped by “what we learned in the Sixties”. They keep on forgetting that no one but a senior citizen has actually learned anything about activism in the Sixties. They assume that everyone around them, no matter their age, will be informed by the same historical events that have shaped their ideas.

Share this:

About the authorJim Cook

I haven't been everywhere, but I've lived lots of places in the USA: the North, the South, the East, the West, and places in between. Every place I've been, I've seen acts large and small of kindness, callousness and disregard. Here we are. What will we do?

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.